Johnson took a “very dim view” of the coup, recalls Samuel Gammon, a mid-level State Department staffer at the time. “He said, ‘This is cops and robbers stuff.’ He felt the fact that we knew about it [meant] we obviously could have discouraged it and we should have discouraged it. Diem may have been a son-of-a-bitch, but he was our son-of-a-bitch.”
“One of the greatest mistakes that this country ever made was when we encouraged the South Vietnamese to assassinate this president,” Johnson said in a private recording made when he was long out of office.
Johnson's distress over the murder of Diem was personal as well as political. The two men had met in May of 1961 when Kennedy sent Johnson to Asia.
“Right from the outset, Diem and Johnson took a liking to each other,” Miller says. “Johnson, especially in public, was not just complimentary but effusive about Ngo Dinh Diem.”
In his private recording, Johnson notes that he told Diem he needed “to rise to the occasion and provide the same quality of leadership that Churchill [had]. … It makes no difference whether it’s a fascist aggressor or a communist aggressor, you people have got to stand up here and show some steel [and] not be the Chamberlains of your time. Be the Churchills of your time.”
After Diem’s execution and JFK’s assassination, Johnson appears to have internalized the message he had communicated in his pep talk to Diem. As Churchill had stood up to aggression in Western Europe, it now fell to him, he seemed to believe, to do the same in Asia.
Ultimately, this deep, almost visceral, need to “show some steel,” to be Churchill the warrior rather than Chamberlain the appeaser, would paint the president into a terrible corner — knowing the war was a disaster in the making, but unable or unwilling to walk away.
